Supernatural surveillance and blood-borne disease in Bram Stoker's Dracula: Reflections on mesmerism and HIV

Surveillance and/or voyeuristic viewing are central to certain horror productions and are often related to control and dominance. While such modes of looking are usually less obvious in the vampire film, the vampiric gaze nonetheless exerts a more definitive and immediate effect, causing its victims to fall prey to inevitable death and an extended afterlife. Although all vampire films tend to exploit these mesmeric aspects of Victorian culture, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), directed by Frances Ford Coppola, progresses the notion of 'supernatural surveillance'. Coppola uses numerous creative visual techniques to accentuate the attention to eyes, notably in scenes that are linked to sexual desire and promiscuity. If the original novel implicitly reflected contemporaneous fears of venereal infection, namely syphilis, then Coppola's film is preoccupied with AIDS. This essay argues that the film's attention to eyes and the gaze not only reflects the mesmerism associated with Victorian culture but also resonates with new forms of socio-cultural watchfulness emerging in the AIDS era of the twentieth century.

Health

Bio-political regulation and its limits is the major topic of chapter 3, addressing intimacy and the transnational circulation of knowledge in the control of venereal disease. Two major regulatory tools implemented by the occupiers are at the center of this chapter: venereal disease contact tracing and prophylactic stations. Their analysis uncovers that the contact tracing system, although medically ineffective, helped the occupiers to measure, quantify, and map occupied Japan and its people—and simultaneously to maintain their internal color line by distinguishing venereal infection rates between white and black servicemen. Prophylactic stations, in which servicemen were compelled to clean and protect themselves after sexual exposure, enable insights into the most private spaces of servicemen’s lives.

CARIBBEAN SLAVERY, BRITISH ANTI-SLAVERY, AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF VENEREAL DISEASE

ABSTRACTVenereal disease was commonplace among free and enslaved populations in colonial Caribbean societies. This article considers how contemporaries (both in the empire and metropole) viewed venereal infection and how they associated it with gendered notions of empire and masculinity. It further explores how creole medical practices evolved as planters, slaves, and tropical physicians treated sexually transmitted infections. Yet what began as a familiar and customary affliction was seen, by the late eighteenth century, as a problematic disease in the colonies. As medical theory evolved, placing greater attention on behaviour, British abolitionists focused on the sexual excesses and moral failings of Caribbean slaveholders, evidenced by their venereal complaints. The medicalization of venereal infection and its transition from urbane affliction to stigmatized disease helps explain a key problem in imperial history: how and why West Indian planters became demonized as debauched invalids whose sexual excesses rendered them fundamentally un-British. The changing cultural meanings given to venereal disease played an important role in giving moral weight to abolitionist attacks upon the West Indian slave system in the late eighteenth century. This article, therefore, indicates how changing models of scientific explanation had significant cultural implications for abolitionists, slaveholders, and enslaved people alike.

Genetic Divergence with Emergence of Novel Phenotypic Variants of Equine Arteritis Virus during Persistent Infection of Stallions

ABSTRACT The persistently infected carrier stallion is the critical natural reservoir of equine arteritis virus (EAV), as venereal infection of mares frequently occurs after breeding to such stallions. Two Thoroughbred stallions that were infected during the 1984 outbreak of equine viral arteritis in central Kentucky subsequently became long-term EAV carriers. EAV genomes amplified from the semen of these two stallions were compared by sequence analysis of the six 3′ open reading frames (ORFs 2 through 7), which encode the four known structural proteins and two uncharacterized glycoproteins. The major variants of the EAV population that sequentially arose within the reproductive tract of each carrier stallion varied by approximately 1% per year, and the heterogeneity of the viral quasispecies increased during the course of long-term persistent infection. The various ORFs of the dominant EAV variants evolved independently, and there was apparently strong selective pressure on the uncharacterized GP3 protein during persistent infection. Amino acid changes also occurred in the V1 variable region of the GL protein. This region has been previously identified as a crucial neutralization domain, and selective pressures exerted on the V1 region during persistent EAV infection led to the emergence of virus variants with distinct neutralization properties. Thus, evolution of the EAV quasispecies that occurs during persistent infection of the stallion clearly can influence viral phenotypic properties such as neutralization and perhaps virulence.